So we have to get very, very tough on cyber

Of course, it’s obvious what it means. You couldn’t miss it. It rose off the debate like steam. Clinton has the skills needed for this job, and Trump does not. Trump does not remotely have those skills – not even a little bit. He doesn’t have truncated versions of those skills, he has their opposites. He doesn’t even know what the fuck he’s talking about.

Trump did his best to be fair. He interrupted Clinton 25 times in the debate’s first 26 minutes. He talked over both her and moderator Lester Holt with ease. But the show of dominance quickly ran into a problem: Trump would shout over his interlocutors only to prove he had nothing to say.

Trump’s riffs were dotted by baldfaced lies of the kind the press will easily check, but, more consequentially, he spoke in a barely coherent stream of consciousness.

He did. It was garble. At times he even interrupted his own self, by interjecting something completely random and then pausing, as if at the end of a sentence.

Klein does some compare and contrast. The “cyber” one was good:

Take Trump’s answer on cybersecurity:

As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said, we should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not. I don’t know if we know it was Russia who broke into the DNC.

She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China, it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds. You don’t know who broke into DNC, but what did we learn? We learn that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people. By Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Look what happened to her. But Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of. Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don’t know, because the truth is, under President Obama we’ve lost control of things that we used to have control over. We came in with an internet, we came up with the internet.

And I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the internet, they’re beating us at our own game. ISIS. So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is a, it is a huge problem.

I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing, but that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.

I could _not_ stop giggling (and probably did a Clintonesque shoulder shimmy of my own) at this because, and sure, this probably betrays my age: once upon a time, in the ancient days of the net, ‘cyber’ was in the argot of many who lived therein, short for ‘cybersex’. Which was usually just dirty chatting, (or sexting, in modern parlance, tho’ probably usually in the chat clients of the day, not via SMS)… You could ‘cyber’, in fact, as a verb…

So, you know, I guess I’m at once admitting I’m mentally six, while betraying that I’m physically quite another thing…

(Less immature part…)

More seriously: this is kinda _standard_ for Trump. He’s a damned sinkhole of just got no clue. Worse, he can’t seem ever to take seriously that this really won’t do, in this and so many other areas. I muttered a bit Clinton’s thing was a bit low info for my tastes, but, listen, first of all, that’s going to be pretty much anything anyone not in my business says on this, and second, the sense I got is: at least she _thought_ about it, has some notion of the ins, outs, vulnerabilities, significances, capabilities, and you can’t really know quite the depth of her knowledge or lack thereof from that brief snippet she chose to do at a debate where you really _can_ only get so detailed. Trump, it was just glaring: talking through his hat. And given how significant this is all becoming to the world, and rapidly, it’s a bit like having a candidate for president who figures he doesn’t really need to know where China even is, let alone the state of their technical acumen.

A related observation: the ‘very, very tough’ and ‘very, very strongly’, by the end of the evening, was starting at once to grate and amuse. Apart from highlighting the guy’s really pretty limited means of self-expression (seriously, guy, this language has all these synonyms for pretty much everything; I encourage you to explore a little), it just _glowed_ with weakness. I’m reminded of Merkel’s commenting on Putin’s juvenile bringing of a dog to one of their meetings (she’s a bit phobic, and he knows this): this is a tell. Huge insecurity, constant insisting, oh, I am tough, I can intimidate people, I’m a big man.

And no, if you need to tell yourself (and anyone else within earshot) this so constantly, you’re really not.

For someone with such inexplicable confidence as a public speaker, Trump is not even remotely eloquent.

That rambling rant about “cyber” did not contain much of a point as far as I could see.

But my favourite part was when he first denigrated Clinton’s experience, and when she handily rebuked him on that point, he conceded that yes, she had experience after all, but it was “bad experience”.

He seemed to just be doing a lot of chest beating and howling, with random verbiage thrown in as an afterthought…

I just did a quick count on the Washington Post Transcript. Trump said ‘very’ 56 times and ‘very very’ eight times, making a total ‘very’ count of 67 times. Mostly in the latter stages of the debate and sometimes 4-7 verys in a paragraph.

I didn’t do a count for Clinton and Holt, but I would estimate that the two of them combined were (substantially) less than half Trump’s count.

It read as if he was trying to appear, strong, assertive and dominant (considering just context not detail).

Plus it also just betrays the fact that there’s nothing much going on in there. He doesn’t think, he just has some impressions and images and clichés. He has sound bites and feelings. He’s not intelligent and he’s not thoughtful so naturally he’s not articulate. You need raw material to be articulate.